Burnt-out after 19 taxing rounds of slumping in your La-Z-Boy and spraying soggy Dorito crumbs onto the flat-screen as you cheer and hiss and make menacing gestures at referees? Me too.
But today the Raiders go up against the Dragons, and what is already a huge match in terms of the fabled hoodoo and the fact that about half the St George Illawarra side is made up of former and soon-to be-former Raiders, is also, courtesy of Josh Dugan, set to be the most personal in recent Raider history.
For the fans this game provides a unique opportunity to reinvigorate your latent bloodlust and engage in rugby league as it once was, via a good old fashioned grudge match.
The Raiders say it’s not personal. They say that it’s just another game of footy they prepare themselves for, the same as any other. The Raiders lie.
Because who among us, Canberra playing group included, doesn’t love a real rivalry, where real feelings are involved. Especially one where the possibility of making Josh Dugan pay is on offer?
Dugan’s comments describing his misadventures in rooftop drinking as some kind of idyllic Tom Sawyer-type afternoon “just kicking back catching a bit of sun,” and accusing the Raiders of disregarding his welfare and consigning him to scrapheap status have inflamed fans and sent the grudge-o-metre into overdrive for this game.
He timed this well, because until last week it was all starting to feel a bit redundant. It had been months since he’d been driven out of Canberra and onto his scrapheap and forced from there to seek urgent asylum with the Dragons.
It hadn’t seemed to have cost him much at all other than the small matter of his reputation and any lingering shreds of likeability that his increasing abrasiveness hadn’t corroded in the last 12 months at the Raiders.
In hindsight you can see that all this was coming.
The problem with Josh Dugan and Canberra was that the Raiders demand low maintenance superstars who hum along quietly. As Dugan developed from a raw colt to sleek thoroughbred his self-regard developed right along with him. Healthily at first, then not so healthily, until finally it became toxic.
Basically, the Raiders are chronic underperformers and need to conduct themselves accordingly. This means behaving in a humble and gracious manner, and keeping the ostentatious off-field flourishes to a minimum.
Dugan’s spirited accommodation of all things ostentatious defied this and, as he tells it, led to him being cruelly and without prior warning cast out of Canberra and onto this scrapheap he speaks of.
The moral of the story, aside from the fact that there really are no morals because this is professional sport, is that Dugan is not the first to suffer under the staggering weight of Australia’s inherent dislike of unbridled egotism, and nor will he be the last.
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